Brexit and movement of people

by Alexandra Bosbeer

Spending this summer in the UK – especially for me, a non-UK EU citizen – has felt like a slightly risky direct experience of history. Reading national papers gives one a sense of the delicate selection of vocabulary in the multi-faceted discussion about what Brexit might mean. The desire for benefits without costs, does seem a bit idealistic. Yesterday, on 5 September, the Brexit minister was clear that there must be “controls on the numbers of people who come to Britain from Europe” even if that might mean less access to the single market. (This is followed within a day by the Prime Minister’s team’s statement that the single market remains an ideal.) And Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had said only the day before, on 4 September, that the UK looks forward to welcoming more Polish immigrants.

But of course one would need to be extremely callous to bar people in extreme need. Although there are more people arriving each year in Britain from non-EU countries, in this case the target group for reduction are the EU migrants.

The ‘other’

Why is immigration of other Europeans such a hot topic in Britain today? It seems that EU immigrants might be a fairly acceptable group of ‘other’. One hopes it would still be morally outrageous for a politician in the UK to focus on those non-EU migrants who are racially different from white English people (although a populist party in the Netherlands has done just that). The other Europeans who can be identified by language if not by skin colour, might be slightly more acceptable targets. So, for example, Nigel Farage almost sounds like an anti-racist in his recent post on the UK Independence Party (UKIP) website when he writes “Given that myself and others also campaigned for a migration system that would treat all who wanted to come equally, any preference for EU nationals would be totally unacceptable”. (I will leave aside the revisionist nature of a claim today of any coherent plan in the ‘Leave’ campaign.)